Aviva Rahmani, "Shaping a Salt Marsh" bioengineering and art, on the former coastal town dump. Photo documentation by aerial photographer Ben Magro, 1997.

Aviva RahmaniFrom 1991 to 2000, Aviva Rahmani worked on a major restoration art project called Ghost Nets on a former coastal dump site near the Gulf of Maine. Working with biologists, bioengineers and the local
community of Vinalhaven, Rahmani created a replicable model for sustainable restoration, including fresh and salt water
marshland systems.

"It took me twenty years to put technological work, environmental art and an interest in the issues that degrade people, such
as rape, domestic violence and child abuse together. When I did, I called it "Ghost Nets" because the technology of the
fishing industry traps sea life as we trap each other and our environment in the denial of our interdependence. It is important to
me to see the loss of salt marsh wetlands anthropomorphically and its subsequent "rescue" as metaphorical but these are not
simply poetic allusions. In "Ghost Nets" I set out to make connections between very small, documented decisions and the larger
process of moving 16 truckloads of granite debris and collaborating with Bioengineers to make a viable ecosystem."